During surgery or in the emergency room, it is often necessary to infuse blood rapidly where massive blood loss or exsanguination has occurred. Patients having inadequate blood volume can suffer disastrous consequences.
Many situations give rise to the loss of great amounts of blood in a short period of time. These situations include hemorrhagic trauma resulting from injury to the patient, and a variety of major vascular, orthopedic, thoracic, and abdominal surgeries such as cancer surgery and liver transplantation.
In the past, surgical teams have had difficulty rapidly replacing blood lost from a patient. In a commonly used method of rapid infusion, several infusion sites are utilized at one time. Infusion bags or bags of stored banked blood are connected to the sites by intravenous tubing. Often, four or more personnel are required to manage the various infusion sites, manually squeezing blood bags or operating direct pressure pumps to infuse blood through the sites. Where warmed blood is desired for infusion, heating coils are often provided surrounding the infusion bags, thus requiring more complex apparatus which is nevertheless inefficient for warming at rapid infusion rates; this also requires multiple personnel. These and other similar currently used methods of rapid infusion have many drawbacks. Often, for example, where stored banked blood is used directly from bags, the chemistry of the blood utilized for infusion is inappropriate for the necessary high infusion rates of 1-3 liters per minute or more, and can have serious, even lethal effects on the patient. Further, the presence of numerous personnel monitoring the infusion sites and manually squeezing blood bags or operating pumps can create a chaotic atmosphere and distract others in the performance of their duties.
Utilizing conventional infusion methods, blood is often lost faster than it can be given and the patient goes into shock. In other situations, blood is infused fast enough but it is cold, acidic, and chemically imbalanced, leading to hypothermia and possibly cardiovascular instability.
Conventional rapid infusion methods also provide significant potential for contamination. The presence of multiple personnel, the use of multiple sites, and the process of opening numerous blood bags and attaching them to lines greatly increases the risk of contamination This is of particular concern for liver transplant patients and other critically ill patient where sterile conditions are of extreme importance.
Further, blood infused by conventional methods is occasionally inadequately filtered and warmed, which can lead to severe consequences. It can also lack cost effectiveness, in view of the large number of people required to carry out the infusion and the length of time the patients generally must remain in intensive care after surgery requiring rapid infusion.
Lastly, the morbidity and mortality rates encountered with conventional massive transfusion or infusion techniques and apparatus are unacceptably high, particularly in liver transplant or resection operations.
Accordingly, a need exists for a rapid blood infusion apparatus and method which can successfully infuse large quantities of warmed, processed blood in a short time, which can be conveniently operated by one individual, which eliminates the need for multiple infusion sites on the patient, and which is easy to set up, operate, and maintain.